Facebook discovered ad network paying influencers for criticizing vaccines

The social network Facebook has decided to delete more than a hundred accounts after discovering an entire advertising network dedicated to misinform and promote anti-vaccine ideas for COVID-19.

The company came to eliminate 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts associated with the campaign in question. The whole operation would have been carried out by the British advertising and marketing firm Fazzé, although under contract with an unknown client.

Of course, what Facebook has revealed is that the plans for the ad campaign “are said to originate from Russia” and its operations have so far mainly focused on the regions of. Latin America and also India, with a small presence in United States. Although the social network pointed out that the campaign was in fact very unsuccessful and somewhat “sloppy”.

It developed through 2 different waves, the first starting at the end of 2020 with a series of memes and comments indicating that AstraZeneca vaccine said to turn people into chimpanzees. The second wave came in May 2021 with new publications questioning the safety of the Pfizer vaccine and a supposedly disclosed document AstraZeneca demonstrating its danger to the public.

As part of the advertising plot, fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram give movement to elaborate publications. Later, once the campaign advanced, Fazze would have started contact influencers from different regions to join the effort by offering them payment in exchange for sharing deceptive content.

It was precisely because of the decision to contact influencers that the project failed, as they were only one of the personalities with whom they communicated in France and Germany who, in turn, contacted Facebook to alert of the situation. In response, the social network not only deleted the accounts from its platforms, but also prohibits the presence of the advertising network in all its networks.

On how the whole strategy was carried out, Ben Nimmo, the world’s leading intelligence firm on corporate threats to influence operations, said it was about a fairly sloppy job with a fairly low participation. Apparently, the only posts that received noticeable attention were those from influencers who joined the plot to claim that “vaccines are deadly.”

As to the possible reasons for the entire campaign, Facebook did not offer a direct comment on the customer’s identity or intentions, although Nimmo noted that the scheme “coincided roughly with the time when regulators and some of the target countries were discussing emergency clearance for each vaccine ”.

Although the situation in this case has been brought under control, this news is coming in a moment of tension for Facebook after being repeatedly accused by the US government of danger to the company due to the disinformation networks that have emerged on the platform, to which the company has developed various strategies of verification and control of the data.

What this new campaign suggests, while not successful, is that new methods of persuasion and advertising strategy They are already taking place on social networks with increasingly elaborate and complex structures.

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